Scientists push closer to understanding mystery of deep earthquakes

Scientists have broken new ground in the study of deep earthquakes, a poorly understood phenomenon that occurs when tectonics drive the oceanic crust under continental plates.

This research is a large step toward replicating the full power of these earthquakes—to learn what sets them off and how they unleash their power off the coasts of the western United States, Russia and Japan. It was only made possible only by the construction of a one-of-a-kind X-ray facility that can replicate high pressure and temperature while allowing scientists to peer deep into material to trace the propagation of cracks and shock waves.

“We are capturing the physics of deep earthquakes,” said Yanbin Wang, a senior scientist at the University of Chicago who helps run the X-ray facility at Argonne National Laboratory, where the research occurred. “Our experiments show that, for the first time, laboratory-triggered brittle failures during the olivine-spinel (mineral) phase transformation has many similar features to deep earthquakes.”

Wang and a team of scientists from Illinois, California and France simulated deep earthquakes in an Argonne by using a pressure of 5 gigapascals, more than double the previous studies of 2 GPa. For comparison, pressure of 5 GPa is 4.9 million times the pressure at sea level.

At this pressure, rock should be squeezed too tight to rapture and erupt into violent earthquakes, yet it does. And that has puzzled scientists since the phenomenon of deep earthquakes was discovered nearly 100 years ago. Interest spiked with the May 24, 2013 eruption in the waters near Russia of the world’s strongest deep earthquake—roughly five times the power of the great San Francisco quake of 1906.

Old and cold

These deep earthquakes occur in older and colder areas of the oceanic plate that gets pushed into the earth’s mantle. It has been speculated that the earthquakes are triggered when a mineral common in the upper mantle, olivine, undergoes a transformation that weakens the whole rock temporarily, causing it to fail.

“Our current goal is to understand why and how deep earthquakes happen. We are not at a stage to predict them yet. It is still a long way to go,” Wang said.

“GSECARS is the only beamline in the world that has the combined capabilities of in-situ X-ray diffraction and imaging, controlled deformation, in terms of stress, strain and strain rate, at high pressure and temperature, and acoustic emission detection,” Wang said. “It took us several years to reach this technical capability.”

High-pressure failure

This new technology is a dream come true for the paper’s co-author, geologist Harry Green, a distinguished professor of the graduate division at the University of California, Riverside.

More than 20 years ago, he and colleagues discovered a high-pressure failure mechanism that they proposed then was the long-sought mechanism of very deep earthquakes (earthquakes occurring at a depth of more than 400 kilometers/248.5 miles). The result was controversial because seismologists could not find a seismic signal in the Earth that could confirm the results.

Seismologists have now found the critical evidence. Indeed, beneath Japan, they have even imaged the telltale evidence and showed that it coincides with the locations of deep earthquakes.

“We confirmed essentially all aspects of our earlier experimental work and extended the conditions to significantly higher pressure,” Green said. “What is crucial, however, is that these experiments are accomplished in a new type of apparatus that allows us to view and analyze specimens using synchrotron X-rays in the premier laboratory in the world for this kind of experiment—the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.”

The ability to do such experiments has now allowed scientists like Green to simulate the appropriate conditions within the Earth and record and analyze the “earthquakes” in their small samples in real time, thus providing the strongest evidence yet that this is the mechanism by which earthquakes happen at hundreds of kilometers depth.

The origin of deep earthquakes fundamentally differs from that of shallow earthquakes (earthquakes occurring at less than a depth of 50 kilometers/31 miles). In the case of shallow earthquakes, theories of rock fracture rely on the properties of coalescing cracks and friction.

“But as pressure and temperature increase with depth, intracrystalline plasticity dominates the deformation regime so that rocks yield by creep or flow rather than by the kind of brittle fracturing we see at smaller depths,” Green explained. “Moreover, at depths of more than 400 kilometers, the mineral olivine is no longer stable and undergoes a transformation resulting in spinel, a mineral of higher density.”

The research team focused on the role that phase transformations of olivine might play in triggering deep earthquakes. They performed laboratory deformation experiments on olivine at high pressure and found the “earthquakes” only within a narrow temperature range that simulates conditions where the real earthquakes occur in Earth.

“Using synchrotron X-rays to aid our observations, we found that fractures nucleate at the onset of the olivine to spinel transition,” Green said. “Further, these fractures propagate dynamically so that intense acoustic emissions are generated. These phase transitions in olivine, we argue in our research paper, provide an attractive mechanism for how very deep earthquakes take place.”

Wang said researchers’ next goal is to study the material silicate olivine, which requires much higher pressures.

Funding: The Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers and L’Agence Nationale de la Recherche and the National Science Foundation. Use of the Advanced Photon Source was funded by U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

Authors: Alexandre Schubnel at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, France; Fabrice Brunet at the Université de Grenoble, France; Julian Gasc and Wang at the University of Chicago; Nadège Hilairet at the University of Chicago and UMET, CNRS - Université Lille 1; and Green of UC Riverside.

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Deep earthquakes have puzzled scientists since the phenomenon was discovered nearly 100 years ago. Interest spiked earlier this year when the world’s strongest deep earthquake occurred in Russia—with roughly five times the power of the great San Francisco quake of 1906 (pictured above).